Finding your element? —First make a pact with Time.
Being in your element. Expressing your creative capacity. What are these? Do you know yours, for yourself?
Today’s post is inspired by Ken Robinson, his book, “Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life”, 2014 and his 2006 TED Talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” At the time of his death in August 2020, his was the most watched TED talk of all time with 66.3 million views on the TED channel and millions more on YouTube.
As children when we play we are in our element. Do you remember that state of mind? Almost like being lost into something and quite happy to be there too!
What was yours, your element, as a child? Mine was Lego, most frequently Lego. For some of my friends too. For others I remember it being reading, drawing or playing sports. My countless hours of lost time were spent on the floor of my bedroom with my Lego. Remembering it now I can recall being in a profound state of concentration. Completely present, expressing ideas out of the chaotic jumble and variety of bricks into an ordered structure. A structure that had utility — it could be played with and enjoyed.
I remember myself becoming part of the process, like an assimilation into the play with all loss of awareness of time. This freezing of time - where the passing of time so often for a child is painful boredom - instead became something else. As I think about it now, it’s like a slipping into another place of consciousness and awareness: An awareness from within an immersed world of which I was deeply integrated.
The hours I spent designing, searching, building, breaking, rebuilding, adapting and re-making. These weren't hours to me. They weren't even moments. Instead a place of focused being and doing, held in a space of time much like the way a container holds empty space. This container could’ve been floating in space. It could have been anywhere. It didn't matter because it was complete immersion. Until the moment when awareness is brought back to another present consciousness awoken by the calling of my mother to come for dinner.
When we’re in our element we are surrendered into time as a space, a different space. We give permission to time to holds us there and in good faith: as a trust we give it and in return we receive a place in which we are held safely and securely. In that held space we can be. In fact we are fully being, safe to play, to learn, to explore, to experience. This is being in our element.
And yet this granted place and given safety require of us a surrender first. This is what to transcend means. To let go in order to move into somewhere deeper, richer, fuller. This kind of letting go has a quality to it, it is the giving up of control; a handing over of the steering wheel to time in trust. This exchange is a bond based on trust, that what was there before will be there for us to return to. Dinner time will be there to come back to!
The practice of finding our element therefore is first a willingness to make an agreement with time. A pact with time. And this agreement, although always there for the making, for the creating, it must be instigated by us. We must set our place into it. We must be prepared to enter into it and be without control of the space given by time, for that is time's part not ours. Our part is the activity, the living, the being within the space. We cannot be both the doing and the space simultaneously. This reminds me of Heisenberg's Principle — it is not possible at the same time to hold both the location (the space) and the velocity (the activity) of ourselves at this 'sub-atomic'/'transcendent' level. For to be the observer of ourselves at this level in both being and doing we change the nature of that being and break this space of agreement with time.
Finding our element requires a granting of permission by us to time to provide the space for us to immerse into. Not with one eye on the door looking to maintain control but rather allowing ourselves to fully immerse into, surrendering into this exchange with time. This agreement grants us a place of pure creative freedom - the transcendent place of 'flow', of being in our element: To dance, to draw, to build, to sing, to design, to move, or as in my case now, to write these words.
Thank you time for this provision of space to express in. Perhaps too, when we are being in such flow, you are as enriched and fulfilled as we are.
